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Writing good technical documentation, part 3

Posted Tuesday, July 21, 2009 9:45 PM by Jeanie Decker
(Part 2) (Part 1) Nathan Bransford, a literary agent, blogged about his difficulty in getting writers to paste their original query into their partial manuscript . Here are the instructions he sends them: "Thank you for your recent note. Would you mind Read More...
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Writing good technical documentation, part 2

Posted Monday, March 09, 2009 8:54 PM by Jeanie Decker
(Part 1) Joel Spolsky has an excellent post on the role of the program manager . I work with program managers, so I read through it comparing his descriptions with the PMs I've known. Then I got to the part on functional specifications and my interest Read More...
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Writing good technical documentation, part 1

Posted Tuesday, January 06, 2009 10:40 PM by Jeanie Decker
A recent comment by "BPM software" suggested that I write about best practices for writing technical documentation. I thought about it for awhile and decided I couldn't really do it justice in one post - hence, "part 1". I'll begin by plagiarizing myself Read More...
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How not to write a user manual

Posted Monday, April 21, 2008 7:52 PM by Jeanie Decker
I have to disagree with Tony Soper's admiration for the Pong user instructions: "Insert quarter Ball will automatically serve Avoid missing ball for high score" Tony and I worked together on the same team, so he's used to my contrariness. :-) I don't Read More...
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Web vs. print challenges

Posted Friday, September 07, 2007 10:12 AM by Jeanie Decker
If you took a look at the DPM 2007 Operations Guide during the beta, you might have noticed that the server chapters have a similar organization: general maintenance management data recovery And within those sections are parallel topics, such as: renaming Read More...
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Task-based documentation

Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 11:52 AM by Jeanie Decker
I'm packing up for the WritersUA Conference with great anticipation. It's a bit of a busman's holiday for me. Lately I've been immersed in the technical aspects of what I was writing about, so it's a pleasure to step back from that and think about the Read More...
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How to write really bad instructions

Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 8:02 PM by Jeanie Decker
This evening, trying to assemble a pressure-mounted baby gate for my dog, I picked up several tips and tricks for writing really bad instructions that I just have to share for everyone's edification: Only name half of the parts in the diagram. Users enjoy Read More...
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The system tray that never was

Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006 10:29 AM by Jeanie Decker
In a a recent post , The Old New Thing made reference to terminology errors, citing the system tray as an example. To quote: "One of the most common errors is to refer to the Taskbar Notification Area as the "tray" or the "system tray". This has never Read More...
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Looks like a file synchronization solution (Windows XP)

Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 7:08 AM by Jeanie Decker
Tristank mentioned a Powertoy that sounded interesting, SyncToy for Windows XP . (An aside...I think it's odd that back when hard drive space was limited and expensive, I'd download anything that caught my interest...and now that I have lots of inexpensive Read More...
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IT pros - how do you use worksheets

Posted Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:08 AM by Jeanie Decker
If you've ever used any product documentation that included worksheets , checklists , or other job aids , I'd appreciate your input on two questions. How do you actually use those job aids? And how would you like to be able to use them? For example... Read More...
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